


not if it's you

by rulebreakingmoth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abortion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Morning Sickness, Sickfic, Unplanned Pregnancy, body image issues, the author has been thinking a lot about love languages, the mortifying ordeal of being known and loved for who you are anyway, ~midsommar voice~ do you feel held by him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:46:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26325856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rulebreakingmoth/pseuds/rulebreakingmoth
Summary: “I’d like to help you pay for it.”“That’s what you got out of that? Jaime, I’m not actually bereft, you know.”“You deserve to have a partner in this! Someone who doesn’t completely ignore your calls like a coward.” She hasn’t actually spoken to Hyle since that first conversation where he made it very clear that he was not interested, emotionally or financially, in whatever she chose to do about the pregnancy. She had considered it a blessing that he was leaving it up to her choice. She wonders if it’s a sign that she’s not even really sad that Hyle’s gone, but speaking it out loud would fill Jaime with such annoying satisfaction that she bites her tongue.“If you so much as look at your credit card when we’re there, I’ll make sure I’m not the only one bleeding from between my legs.”(or, Brienne has an abortion and can't figure out why Jaime is so invested in taking care of her)
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 75
Kudos: 243





	not if it's you

**Author's Note:**

> hey! welcome to my abortion fic. please heed all warnings and know that this is very much about abortion, and it is discussed many times in detail. if that triggers or offends you in any way, please just steer clear! and don't try to start any ~discourse~ in the comments, I've been a pro-choice advocate for like a decade now and I've heard it all before. full content warnings in the end notes if you're iffy!
> 
> title is obviously from An Oresteia, the quintessential expression of devotion and caretaking

It’s been ages since she’s seen Jaime this angry, since his fists clenched at his sides and the corded muscles in his neck bulged so thick she could almost feel the strength of themjust by looking. Not since...Gods, not since his hand has she seen him like this. She had hoped then that she’d never have to again, but now—

“I’ll kill him,” he says, pacing back and forth, wearing a hole into the kitchen tile. There’s something deathly serious in the tone of his voice, ice cold but vibrant at the same time. Severe. Barely bluffing, if at all.

“You’ll do no such thing,” she says, even as the thought of it sends a strange little shiver up the length of her spine. 

She rests her head on the bar that separates their kitchen from the living room, even though it requires her to hunch her shoulders over uncomfortably. The cool granite is a balm on her clammy forehead. She swallows down a wave of nausea.

“Vile Hunt,” he spits. “Hyle Cunt—”

“Easy.” She doesn’t take much pleasure in Jaime’s revulsion towards Hyle, never has. It’s hard enough to bring anyone home to meet Jaime, to assure them that the two of them are “just roommates” and that there’s no threat. But if Hyle had managed to get over that hill (which, part of her suspects he didn’t), then there was a second one waiting for him just at the bottom: Jaime unequivocally _hated_ him. He had made no secret of it either, scoffing openly when Hyle spoke of his work, his friends, anything at all really. He called him foolish, mediocre, unfit to lick Brienne’s boots. Only until Brienne threatened to drop the lease, move back in with Sansa, and delete Jaime’s number did he begin to act with any sense of decorum. Usually that just meant avoiding Hyle entirely. 

But now she’s the fool, and Jaime was right. And there is no comfort in it.

“And he’s not going to stick around to raise it, or even meet it—”

“I never expected him to.” She folds her arms underneath her head.

“Of course you didn’t. You never expected enough of him, and look where it got you. Gods, Brienne, how could you—” Her head snaps up, and he withers instantly under her gaze, blue steel peering out from her folded arms. “I’m sorry.” His head hangs, golden hair falling in his eyes. “That was unworthy of me.”

She snorts. “Business as usual then,” letting only the barest hint of teasing shine through. He situates himself across from her at the bar, his left hand coming to cup gently around her right elbow, stroking at the wrinkled skin there. She neither leans into his touch nor pulls away; it’s as much of a concession as she’s willing to make right now.

“I’ll help you,” he says, low and gentle. “Raise it, that is.”

At that she laughs outright. “Jaime, I don’t think—”

His eyes darken. “Of course. What would I know about raising a bastard.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She raises her head, breathing slowly to soothe the way it makes her throat burn with bile. His voice is barbed, but there’s only hurt in his eyes. Loss, but not really anger. "I swear, Jaime..."

She imagines briefly Jaime with the child- a baby, pink-skinned and green-eyed and beaming from the crook of his arm. Not Hyle’s, then. She shakes the thought away.

“There’s a clinic,” she explains. “I’ve already made an appointment.”

“I’ll drive you,” he says, without hesitation, and only then do tears spring to her eyes.

—

She tries not to think of it as a child, because it isn’t, not really. It’s a promise more than anything, the _potential_ for a child. But that’s difficult to stomach as well - she’s not the type of person who squashes promises.

Maybe Jaime realizes this, because he’s sure to supply her with pamphlets, articles, little platitudes throughout the day: “One in four women will have an abortion before the age of 45,” he says as if it’s common knowledge and not something he googled during breakfast. “It’s a medical procedure, not a moral failing,” which sounds equally as stunted coming from his lips, but a bit more reassuring.

“I’m fine, really.” She sips at her tea as she reclines back on the sofa, feeling more like herself than this morning when Jaime first discovered her hunched over the toilet bowl. “It’s not like I don’t know anybody who’s gotten one.” It’s true. Margaery got one last year. They sent her flowers, the two of them signing the card with a simple “Love you” from Brienne and a “Don’t get back out there too soon!” from Jaime. Margaery loved them, had posted both the flowers and card on her instagram story. 

“You also know someone who’s lost a hand, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to give you free reign of the meat cleaver until you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

She ignores that it’s hardly an apt comparison - it’s not the abortion that feels like losing a hand, but the pregnancy itself. Part of her body is not her own now, the body that has always, for better or worse, been hers to cultivate and strengthen. Even in school, when the boys were cruel and the girls pitying, there was solace in knowing that they could not stop her from taking another wrestling championship, that she could easily shove Ronnet Connington down the bleachers without him seeing her tears. But now she’s skipped the gym two days in a row, and there’s an unsettling fluttering low in her belly. She knows it’s not actually the fetus (“Embryo,” Jaime’s annoying voice provides helpfully), but there’s an alien sort of presence to it anyway. She _feels_ it’s in there, whether it’s really made itself known or not.

“Hey,” Jaime says, breaking her from her thoughts, and she finds him glaring at his phone. “Did you know this? You have to wait 24 hours after your first appointment?”

At that she perks up, head lifted off the arm of the sofa. “What?” 

“Yeah.” He straightens up in his armchair and reads, “‘Many regions require that women receive counseling before an abortion is performed, and the woman must then wait a specified time period, most often 24 hours, between the counseling and the procedure.’ So basically you have to make two trips.”

“Shit,” she whispers, letting her head fall back to the sofa with a groan. She’s scheduled her appointment for Saturday morning, thinking that would give her the weekend to recover. But if the procedure doesn’t happen until Sunday, then she’ll likely have to call into work on Monday.

“I don’t remember it being this difficult with...” he trails off, reluctant to mention Cersei in front of her. She had suspected before - nobody stays married for that long without a slip-up or two, even with a husband as unappealing as Robert Baratheon.

She wonders if Jaime had felt pride that she had chosen to keep _his_ children. He must have, even if he had been denied the right to raise them, to hold them. To make them his in more than just flesh and blood. Thinking about it always instills in Brienne a twisted cocktail of revulsion and compassion, but he and Cersei are more than a decade past now, so she tries not to dwell on it. 

“Well, it couldn’t be the same for us commoners,” she jests dryly, but it doesn’t make him chuckle like it normally would. He is motionless and severe-looking in his chair, and she waits until he finally breaks the silence.

“I’d like to help you pay for it.”

“That’s what you got out of that? Jaime, I’m not actually bereft, you know.”

“Come on, I’d like to use the inheritance on something worthwhile.” He leans forward, the stump of his right arm coming to rest on his knees. “It wouldn’t be the first time Lannister money paid for a procedure like this. I’m sure Tyrion has a punch card.” 

“Jaime,” she says sternly so there’s no room for discussion. “No.”

“You deserve to have a partner in this! Someone who doesn’t completely ignore your calls like a coward.” She hasn’t actually spoken to Hyle since that first conversation where he made it very clear that he was not interested, emotionally or financially, in whatever she chose to do. She had considered it a blessing that he was leaving it up to her choice. She wonders if it’s a sign that she’s not even really sad that Hyle’s gone, but speaking it out loud would fill Jaime with such annoying satisfaction that she bites her tongue. 

“If you so much as look at your credit card when we’re there, I’ll make sure I’m not the only one bleeding from between my legs.”

He does finally laugh then, deep and hearty, and he pushes himself onto his feet. “I’ll grab more tea.” He ruffles her hair as he passes by on his way to the kitchen, tender but playful. Friendly.

She sighs after him, rolls herself onto her side, and thinks she might just kill Hyle herself. 

—

At the clinic, they give her another pregnancy test right after she fills out her forms, which makes this the fourth one she’s taken overall. This one uses clear indicators: “Pregnant” or “Not pregnant” instead of the faded plus and minus signs that had given her some false hope before. Well, maybe some of that had come from a sense of desperation in herself - the second positive should have been all the proof she needed, but she couldn’t help but tell herself that the extra little pink line was somehow an error. 

She’s still pregnant, so at least she hasn’t wasted a trip downtown.

“So we’re all good to move on with the ultrasound now.” The nurse is not much older than Brienne herself, but she holds herself very confidently, and she’s obviously been doing this for a long time. 

“Ultrasound?” Brienne remembers something she and Jaime had read, that sometimes they make you look at the fetus before the procedure, even listen to its heartbeat in some cases. She doesn’t want that, not at all. To feel like a spectator of her own body. 

“It’s just so we can see how far along you are, since you didn’t know the day of your last menstrual cycle.” She says it without judgment, which Brienne appreciates, already feeling stupid enough for not keeping proper track in her calendar. 

They don’t make her change or anything, they just have her lift up her shirt so the ultrasound technician can smear the cold jelly over her flat stomach. She waits for the judgmental glances at her mannish form, the complete lack of a womanly figure under her thin T-shirt, but nothing comes. They must see all types of people in here, but surely not somebody so fully unequipped to carry a child. Some women have birthing hips, their bellies swelling gracefully and beautifully. Brienne can’t imagine she’d look like anything other than a watermelon strapped to a telephone pole.

The technician has the probe thing now, gliding over her taut muscles, clenched from both the cold and her nerves. “There we are...” the technician says, not smiling or anything, just looking at the screen. “Would you like to see?”

“Um...” Brienne hesitates, not knowing if it’s proper to decline. “No, thank you.”

The technician just nods, then removes the probe and wipes the now skin-warm jelly from Brienne’s stomach. “You look to be about seven weeks, which is great.”

“Is it?”

“It just means you have more options. Your nurse can explain further.”

By now she’s so tired of ping-ponging around this clinic she almost wishes she’d just stayed home and tried one of those “herbal remedies” she found on a particularly granola-crunchy website. (Not really - she’s not the type to attempt at-home medical care. Jaime, on the other hand, one tried to treat his own infection for so long and so poorly that he almost got sepsis and ended up in the hospital. She had nearly killed him, and then she had nearly kissed him, but he recovered quickly and neither came to pass.) 

Her nurse explains that she’s early enough in the first trimester that she qualifies for the abortion pill. She can take it at home or somewhere comfortable and ride it out there. Brienne almost cries in relief, wanting desperately out of the antiseptic clinic as soon as possible.

“We’ll see you again tomorrow morning, alright?” the nurse says as she escorts Brienne through the hallways back to the waiting room. Brienne nods, and her nerves must be apparent, because the nurse grasps her shoulder briefly and says, “It’ll be okay. We’ll take care of you.” It reminds her so vividly of Catelyn Stark that she believes truly, for the first time, that it will be. These women are here to help her, to soothe her. She hasn’t clocked a judgmental note from any of them, and she’s well versed in spotting such a thing.

When she’s back in the waiting room, Jaime is flipping nonchalantly through a Women’s Health magazine. She wonders if it’s for a laugh, or if this is also part of his crusade to be as informed about Brienne’s abortion as she is.

“I never thought I’d know so much about mammograms,” he says. The former, then. She kicks at his shin lightly to unseat him, and they walk back to the car together. He curls his hand around the back of her neck, just briefly, a light pulse of his fingers and a scratch at the bottom of her hairline. His hand is back at his side just as quick, but she watches his fingers dance along the steering wheel the whole ride home.

—

“I can’t believe I know someone getting an abortion,” Sansa says later through a mouthful of popcorn. “This is just like Sex and the City.”

“You know me,” Margaery points out.

“You don’t count anymore,” Sansa snarks, shrieking when Margaery instantly reaches over Brienne’s head to yank at Sansa’s hair. They’re each pressed into either side of Brienne on the couch, but it doesn’t stop them from slapping and scratching at each other like a couple of junkyard cats.

“Girls, girls, please!” Jaime chastises playfully from his place at the bar. “Not in the delicate lady’s ear.” 

Brienne glares at being referred to as “delicate” but she’s overpowered by Sansa and Margaery launching cushions and popcorn kernels at Jaime.

“Booooo!”

“Get out, old man! This is a girls only event!”

Jaime juts out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout. (Brienne tries to meet his eyes instead of focusing on how soft and plump that lip is, but no, his eyes are just as dangerous.) “Wench, do you hear how they speak to me?”

She shrugs. “I heard nothing untrue.”

Jaime stands then in mock offense. “I suppose I’ll leave the women to their womanly things.”

“Blah blah blah, talk talk talk,” Sansa mocks, barely keeping a straight face as Jaime flounces dramatically back to his own bedroom. It’s nice, Brienne admits, to watch them all joke around with each other and to know there’s no real tension there anymore.

Sansa leans her head lightly on Brienne’s shoulder. “You know you can always come stay with us if you get tired of your lion’s den,” she says. It’s an offer she’s made many times; initially it was a genuine one, back when she didn’t trust Jaime and believed Brienne was living with him purely out of necessity. Now it’s a frequent joke between them, Brienne’s (mostly) fake exasperation towards her roommate. 

Sansa knows, of course she does, even if Brienne has never told her. She sees the world through such a romantic, pink-tinged lens, it wouldn’t even be possible for Brienne to hide her feelings. Sansa must pick up on the little things, the way she blushes a deeper-than-usual red at Jaime’s teasing, how she lets him stand too close, talk too much. That’s just Jaime, though, and it wouldn’t be right to push him away like so many others have, she tells herself. But she knows that if she truly wanted to, she would have put an end to it years ago, and Sansa knows that too.

Brienne sighs, feigning irritation. “Unfortunately I think I’m quite settled here.”

“He’s become very involved with all this, hasn’t he,” Margaery observes casually, although Margaery never says anything casually without suggesting something entirely un-casual. 

“You know Jaime,” she says. Quick to action always, especially when it comes to his friends. 

“Yes, but...” Margaery trails off, circling a pink fingernail around her wine glass, something indecipherable playing between her clear eyes. “Well, it’s good of you, I guess. Cersei hardly let him be involved with anything at all...”

“Margaery,” Sansa warns, icy and stern. 

Brienne closes her eyes. That’s it, isn’t it. She knows that most roads lead back to Cersei, for as much as Jaime has sworn that she’s as good as dead and lost to him forever. Inside, he’s still that tender-hearted boy, longing for a touch or a soothing word from a beautiful girl, and then he’s also that golden young man who wishes to belong to someone, to do his duty as a husband and father. Brienne can give him none of this, but whatever she can give him that he asks of her, she will. Always. Out of all of these things, he’s still Jaime, who once defended her honor in a seedy bar and walked away with a broken clavicle, who tells her when she deserves better than she accepts, who knows how she takes her tea and what shampoo she uses and why she doesn’t like to swim at night. So whatever he’s playing at here, whatever fantasy this fulfills for him...well, she tells herself it’s fine. By Monday morning there will be no pregnancy or abortion to think of, and she’ll take comfort in knowing she helped him feel useful in an important way and that she did not have to be alone. 

“He’s a good friend,” she says weakly. Margaery drops it there, likely persuaded by Sansa’s persistent glare and Brienne’s unseemly blush. The three of them settle back into an uncomfortable silence, but it soon grows into a comfortable one as they settle in for whatever reality TV dating schlock Sansa has chosen for them. Sansa lays her head back on Brienne’s shoulder while Margaery (at her own insistence) paints the nails of Brienne’s left hand blue, and she is struck by how grateful she is for them, despite her reluctance to return their delicate, friendly affections. She would have once maybe, but having girl friends like this is a tenuous balance - there’s always a thin line between being welcomed in and feeling like a fraud. She resists the urge to settle a hand over her stomach. Just another aspect of her womanhood that she’s failed at.

They don’t speak for another long moment until Brienne breaks the silence, inclining her head towards Margaery and keeping her voice light. “Does it...I’ve been meaning to ask...” She’s not sure how to phrase it, not wanting to sound scared of a little pain. “What does it feel like?”

Margaery, bless her, betrays no pity or judgment, just blows lightly on Brienne’s drying nails as she thinks over her response. “Well, it’s not exactly pleasant. It feels like...”

“Like someone’s shoved a vacuum tube up your raspberry cave?” Sansa finishes, pushing an inelegant snort out of Brienne.

“Absolutely not!” Margaery screeches.

“That’s how you described it!” 

To Brienne only she says, “I swear on my life, I never referred to my vagina as a ‘raspberry cave.’”

“You did say-“

“Yes, of course I said it felt like that, because that’s what it is!” She’s laugh-yelling in the way that girls do with their friends. Brienne smiles, just a whisper at the corners of her lips. “They put a vacuum up your peach hole or whatever,” they’re all laughing now, “and it lasts for a few minutes, and then it’s out.”

“I’m not having the vacuum one,” Brienne says a moment later when their laughter has died down. “I’m doing the pill.”

“Oh,” Margaery says. “Well, that’s way easier.”

“Not to diminish it!” Sansa adds. “Obviously. It’s still...well, it’s still.” She seems to be having trouble articulating what it “still” is — still painful? Still a big deal? Brienne wishes she understood how she was supposed to feel about it. Is abortion a casual, everyday thing now that women can just talk about over cocktails, or is it this heavy, solemn act that she needs to be comforted over? Between everyone’s fussing and reassurances, she’s getting mixed messages. 

“It’s still yours,” Sansa settles on finally. “It’s still going to be as hard or as easy for you as it would any other way.” That doesn’t exactly clarify much, but it does feel...better. There’s no use in dwelling on the shoulds and supposed-tos when things just are the way they are.

“It’s like a heavy period, or so I’ve heard.” Margaery takes Brienne’s other hand between slender fingers to paint her bitten nails. “It won’t feel good, and you might feel nauseous or sore, but then it’s done when it’s done.”

Brienne nods. “Thanks.” To Sansa too, “Thank you.”

“You’d do the same for us,” Sansa says. At that, Brienne feels a surge of pride - she knows it’s true. It feels nice to be recognized for it. She allows herself to rest her own head on top of Sansa’s and closes her eyes against the silken texture of her hair, the smell of citrus shampoo, the warmth of a true friend.

When she wakes, it’s to the feeling of knuckles stroking against her temple. _Sansa_ , she almost groans, but that’s not right. Sansa’s hands are dainty, perpetually cold, and these are warm, solid and rough and so nice.

She opens her eyes to green and gold, Jaime gazing down at her with a smirk. “Hello, sleeping beauty.”

“Not funny,” she mumbles, torn between sitting and stretching her limbs out or curling back tighter into the cushions. Her decision is made for her - as soon as she so much as turns her head in one direction, a wave of nausea flows to her throat. “Jaime—” she croaks, and she must look green because he instantly hands her the small trash bin next to the couch.

He doesn’t rub her back or hold her hair or anything, just averts his eyes and gives her privacy. _He really knows me_ , she thinks with a little thrill, then squashes it down, accepting the napkin he holds out to her so she can wipe her lips. “Won’t miss that,” she says finally when she can.

“Really? But you’re such a glutton for punishment- ow!” He rubs at his tender ribs where she’s elbowed him, a grin still playing on his appalled face. “Maybe I’m the glutton for punishment, staying with you all these years.”

“You said it, not me.” She pushes herself off the sofa, shooting down his attempts to assist her with one stone-cold glance and making her way down the hall towards her room.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Bed.” 

“Oh, come on,” he whines, and she slows but doesn’t stop. “I wanna play FIFA.”

She rolls her eyes. “Shame we don’t always get what we want.” 

“This is unbelievable. So the girls get fun Brienne and I don’t? You should be celebrating your last night of pregnancy before the flush it out and you’re a barren old maid yet again.” His false outrage is bordering on silly, and he’s talking too much, like he always does when he’s trying to hide his nerves. What does _he_ have to be nervous about, she wonders. 

“You’d get ‘fun Brienne’ too if you weren’t always calling her a ‘barren old maid.’” But he’s got her now, she’s awake and jabbing back at him, and she knows she’ll stay up for another hour trash talking and kicking his ass at a video game made for children and people who, unlike them, aren’t good at real sports. But that’s her with Jaime. He spins a web, and she gets caught every time.

He lowers his head, peering up at her through golden eyelashes. “Please?” How does he do that with his eyes? It’s infuriating. It should be illegal, probably violates the Geneva Convention or something.

She throws her arms up, already walking back towards the living room. Cheerily, he throws an arm around her and lowers them both back onto the wrinkled couch cushions. “There’s my Brienne.” She bristles at being called _his_ , mostly to hide the flush as it curls around her neck and collarbones.

She can feel his eyes on her as she fiddles with the remotes, setting out her controller and his adaptive one-handed controller that she got him the first birthday after he lost his hand. (He had sobbed, and she had floundered, unsure if he was pleased or devastated until he had barreled his arms around her and lifted her into a hug so enthusiastic, her feet came off the ground. Nobody except her father had ever managed that before, and she’d walked around the rest of the day feeling lighter than air.) His arm is resting across the back of the couch, but his fingers are reaching out towards her neck, fitting into the notches between her vertebrae, fluttering there. It reminds her of piano lessons, but significantly more compelling.

She turns. He’s still looking at her, his gaze focused...far away. Like he sees her, but he’s thinking about something else entirely. “What?” she asks brusquely.

Jaime opens his mouth to answer, but whatever he’s about to say gets stuck in his throat. He stares a moment longer, lips parted enough that his breath warms her cheek when he exhales with a shudder. “Just…” he finally breaths, and she tenses. She feels crazy, but it _seems_ like he’s leaned in closer, and it _seems_ like he’s staring at her mouth as much as she’s admittedly staring at his, and it _seems…_

It seems like it always does with Jaime. So close and then...just a trick of the light. A joke, or a friendly gesture. 

Jaime sighs and then smiles, too big and broad. “Just thinking about how proud I am of you.” He finishes with a gentle knock to the chin, a “go get ‘em, tiger” sort of gesture. Right.

Her eyebrows pinch together before she shoves his shoulder, hard. “Fuck off.” He laughs, and she laughs, and they play FIFA until Jaime is too sore of a loser to tolerate anymore, and she forgets for a night that she’s single and pregnant and scheduled to have an abortion in the morning. Now, she gets to be Brienne. His Brienne.

—

She’s back at the clinic at 9, the earliest slot they could get her. They tell Jaime he will have to wait in the waiting room again, which he bristles at, looking fully prepared to make a stink, until she stops him with a hand on his forearm.

“It’s not like I need you in there to take a pill,” she says. “I take my birth control without your help every day.”

“Clearly not every day,” he mutters, earning him a sharp flick to the ear. “Sorry.”

They bring her to the back, re-read many of the same consent things and medical jargon that was already covered yesterday in the counseling. She squirms, irritated that such a short procedure has been turned into a multi-day ordeal for seemingly no reason, but she gets through it without much fanfare and then they send in her doctor, a round-faced woman with a crooked smile but an overall pleasant demeanor.

It’s anticlimactic, in the end. Dr. Tarly gives her a pill and says, “This is the first pill. It’s called mifepristone, and it’s going to stop your pregnancy.” She hesitates for a second, eyes shifting between the pill and the paper cup of water. After this, there’s no going back. Well, there is, she read in one of Jaime’s articles that there is _some_ going back after you take the first pill, _maybe_ , but for all intents and purposes, this is it. She feels nervous, but not dread-filled by any means.

She takes the pill. She doesn’t feel any different.

They have her stay for a while longer, presumably to make sure she doesn’t devolve into hysterical regret or an allergic reaction, but before long she’s leaving the clinic with a single dose of misoprostal, which is the pill that does the, well, aborting.

“So you just take it, right?” Jaime asks on the drive home. “You don’t have to, like…” he gestures vaguely below her belt. “...put it anywhere, do you?”

“No, Jaime, I don’t have to ‘put it anywhere.’” The seven are testing her. 

“Not that that would be an issue,” he says straight-faced, although she can see the mirth in his eyes that says he’s about to be insufferable. “I’d put it wherever you needed—”

“Thank you, Jaime.”

They spend the rest of the drive in relative silence, even as Jaime fidgets restlessly with the radio dials. She watches him out of the corner of her eye, pretending to flip through an aftercare pamphlet, and takes in the way his eyes glint with the late morning sun, the confident curl of his hand over the steering wheel. He always keeps the windows cracked, even if it’s too cold, and she wonders if it’s a little bit because he knows how he looks - effortlessly cool and windswept. It’s a cliche, is what it is. 

She tries to imagine herself as a distant onlooker, watching the two of them through the windshield. It’s the kind of thing that used to make her cringe, thinking about how _wrong_ they look together. Beautiful Jaime, his great beast always at his side. A novelty, one of those viral videos of a horse that’s best friends with a cat. But for all that she dislikes thinking about the optics of it, all the unbelievable and confusing realities of how they look side-by-side, she likes the thought that anyone could look in through the window and just _know_ that they matter to each other. It’s in the way Jaime always has a stupid joke to tell, and in the way she rolls her eyes to suppress a laugh every time. It’s clear from the way he adjusts her seat properly before she’s gotten in the car so her legs don’t cramp. There’s this deep sense of knowing between them, always, a connection that Sansa once called “freaky” and “bordering on supernatural.” No one would ever think they were _together_ , at least not from this image alone. But anyone could see Jaime with the wind in his hair, beautiful, and see how at ease he is. Anyone could look at Brienne, and the way she looks at him, and know that, for him, she’d give her right hand as well. Both hands. Anything. Anyone could spare a passing glance and see the glorious anguish of her love for him. She’s practiced hiding it behind snark and exasperation and even pure frigidness at times, but the walls do have to come down sometimes. It might as well be now, when he’s too focused on the road to read too much into her glances.

She’s been staring at him for so long, but Jaime doesn’t notice. He’s smiling at the road in a way that says he has no idea he’s smiling, and she clenches eager fists that itch to reach out and touch the thick scar tissue of his wrist.

Brienne’s eyes dart back to her pamphlet, and she trails her fingers over the glossy edges until they’ve made it back home.

“Wait, I have something for you,” he says before they’ve even fully crossed the threshold of the apartment, running ahead of her towards his room. She’s more than a bit concerned - Jaime is, on the whole, an excellent gift giver, though Brienne herself is not much of a gift receiver, but she wouldn’t put it past him to have ordered a “Happy Abortion!” cake or balloons or something.

He returns moments later with a bundle of plastic pharmacy bags, holding them out to her with a flourish. “For the lady.”

She peeks inside, finding in one bag an assortment of pain relievers, a hot water bottle, and all of her favorite candies. “Oh, Jaime…” she breathes, swallowing the lump in her throat. She peers into the others to find no fewer than five brands of sanitary pads. “A bit overkill, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t know which kind was best,” he admits, unashamed, “so I got them all. I spoke to the fetus, it says you can consider it a parting gift.”

She shoves at his shoulders weakly, her hands lingering long enough to wrap around his neck instead and draw him in. “Thank you. This is the most thoughtful, utterly embarrassing gift anyone has ever given me.”

He hugs her back in kind, arms wrapped firmly around her waist, nose pressed into the hollow where her jaw meets her throat. “Utterly embarrassing is the whole brand, Tarth.” She squirms, his breath ticklish at her neck. “Now let’s get this over with, I do have other things to do, you know.”

She snorts out a laugh and takes the second pill.

—

Maybe Margaery was right that it feels like a heavy period, but Brienne had neglected to consider that she’s had the menstrual cycle of an athlete her whole life - short and light, barely a consideration most of the time. Hell, that’s half the reason she wasn’t tracking it in the first place. So now, as it is, she feels less like she’s on her period and rather more like there’s an alien about to burst from her pelvis. _Technically_ , the annoying Jaime-ish voice in her head says, _that is almost what’s happening_.

It’s not just cramps either - it seems somehow that every bit of her is screaming in protest. Her temples are throbbing, sharp spikes of pain shooting down all the way to the base of her skull, and she’d discovered pretty quickly that any and all sudden movements are a one-way ticket to dizziness and vomiting. So laying down is a requirement, and she can manage that, as long as she’s curled tightly around her hot water bottle. She’s had worse pain, broken bones that ached deeper, a concussion once that left her seriously concerned about permanent damage, but something about this pain just...lingers. It’s like a low frequency underneath everything else - it’s not crippling, but it refuses to be ignored. And it’s only been two hours.

Jaime has been hovering incessantly the whole time, circling the couch only to ask the same, “Can I do anything?” every ten minutes until she finally snaps, “ _Well, you could fucking leave me be so I can rest, couldn’t you?_ ”

She feels bad for that, she really does, especially at the way his face falls open in naked shame, but she doesn’t have the wherewithal to muster an apology. She’ll make it up to him later, she will. For now, she thinks the best course of action is to force herself to sleep through the worst of it. She starts counting, makes it all the way to 130 before she loses track, so she tries going backwards from 100 next, and then she’s just breathing deeply, counting her own breaths, and then she’s drifting dreamlessly.

When she wakes again, she feels better than before, if only because the pain in her head had settled into a much duller ache. She impulsively sits to reach for the glass of water on the coffee table, then instantly regrets it when the motion sends her doubling over the trash can instead. 

She wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand, and she finds then that Jaime has settled back into his armchair across the room, leaned over his own knees like he’s prepped to dash to her side at a moment’s notice. She knows the only reason he hasn’t already is because she snapped at him earlier, and she resolves again to _really_ make it up to him. 

“Hey,” she croaks out, her throat coated in acid.

“Brienne,” Jaime says, sounding strangled. “This is too much. It’s been…” 

“How long?” She’s not sure how long she was asleep - it’s still light out, but part of her fears that means she’s slept through to the next morning and _still_ feels like this.

“Four hours,” he says, his face frozen in concern.

So that’s six hours since she took the pill. “‘m fine,” she grunts. “They said twenty-four was too much.” But six is surely fine, right? She had read four or five was standard, but Dr. Tarly was very clear about every abortion being different. Six didn’t seem outlandish, all things considered.

“I know, but…” He huffs, running a hand through his hair. “I hate seeing you like this. I feel quite…” He hesitates for so long she thinks he may never finish. “...useless.”

She wants to roll her eyes so badly, and under less sensitive circumstances, she absolutely would. As it is, she’s worried even that would make her nauseous.

“Jaime,” she starts, “while I do appreciate your concern, this truly isn’t about _you_ or your _usefulness_.”

“I know that!” he snaps. This morning he had been all soft words and gestures, and she had even been accepting of them - how did they get to this? _Because Jaime is annoying_ , her brain supplies. Then, softer, _Because you’re hurting. Because that hurts him._

“I know that,” he says again. “I’m sorry.” His breath comes out uneven. “I want to help you. I don’t like it when you just suffer silently. You shouldn’t have to.”

She keeps her focus on him, mulling it over. “I need some help getting to my room,” she says finally, and he’s on his feet and by her side before she’s even finished. 

He scoops his arms under her, his handless arm cradling the crooks of her knees, the other one wrapped firmly around her shoulders. 

“N-no, that’s not—“ she stutters as he lifts her into the circle of his arms, his firm, broad chest, the sweet-smelling spot where his neck meets his shoulder. “You can’t carry me!” she insists.

“Rude,” he says, and then does just that. He’s careful not to jostle her much, keeping a slow and steady pace down the hall. When he reaches her room, he nudges the door open with his foot and doesn’t even falter in his balance. _That_ of all things makes her feel lightheaded again. She knows Jaime is strong - they’re almost evenly matched in this way - but seeing it demonstrated, feeling it in his grasp? This isn’t the first time it’s left her breathless. It’s unlikely to be the last. 

He lays her so gently onto her bed, like it wasn’t even a struggle, and she nuzzles into the pillows, seeking both their softness and their escape - so Jaime can’t see the blotchy flush on her face. “Thank you,” she mumbles, waiting to hear his retreating footsteps and the click of the door closing, but they never come.

She turns her head, opens an eye to see that he’s still just hovering, his fingers twitching at his side, and she tells herself it’s sympathy for _him_ that makes her scoot over and pat the empty space next to her head. “Come on, then.”

He hesitates a moment, says, “No, no I should—”

“Jaime.” Despite the gripping sensation in her chest, she is deliberate and steady when she says, “Stay. I want you to.”

He slides in next to her, so slowly, so smoothly, his back propped against the headboard and his thigh sidled up next to her face. She feels another sharp pang in her pelvis, one that wraps all the way around to her lower back. She groans, twisting her face back into her pillows.

There’s a hand in her hair then, scratching lightly, twisting the short straw-like strands around each other, almost playing with it. He pushes the shaggy front pieces back from her forehead, chuckling when they flop right back into place. 

“You did this for me once,” he says finally. She doesn’t have to ask what he’s referring to. After his accident, when the infection had finally healed enough that they could send him home with bandages and enough pain meds to knock a horse onto its ass, she had done this for him. Held him, stroked his greasy hair, then washed it for him, then held him again as it dried. On and on like this for a week until he was strong and sober enough to do some of it himself, and even then. She laid with him in his bed some nights to ease the nightmares, then cut his food for him most days, and she told him that he had to live and fight and move forward or she’d kill him herself. 

She remembers Tywin calling, or rather, Tywin’s _assistant_ calling to demand that Jaime come home and be nursed back to health there, no doubt by an endless parade of well-trained doctors and nurses. Even Cersei had called, just once, begging that her Brienne “stop this madness” and send Jaime back to his family. But Jaime had said _no_ over and over again, _no_ when he was drugged and _no_ when he was lucid, and an absolutely stunning _fuck no_ when he heard that Cersei had called, and Brienne listened. So she was the one who had taken care of him, and to this day she considered it a blessing. To know him like that, to know his fear and his pain and his trust in her. To have seen him in his darkest days and to love him anyway. 

“I remember,” she says because it’s true and because to say anything else would be too much. His palm is big, resting on the side of her face, his thumb burrowing into her throbbing temple. “After this, you can consider the debt repaid.”

“Oh, wench.” He chuckles. “It will never be enough.”

“It’s enough for me,” she says, deathly serious. She opens her eyes, and when they meet his, she finds they’re glassy. “What?”

He shakes his head, smiling again. “You’re too good, Tarth,” he says. “Somebody’s going to steal you away from me one day, and then what’ll I do?”

She sighs, knowing full well the gentle lie in his words. It’s her that’s going to lose him someday, she’s always known that, but it stings to be reminded. She pushes herself up to a seated position and maneuvers around him on the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to use the bathroom.” It’s true, technically; she should change into the next maxi pad before she gets too comfortable in bed, and she wants to give Jaime an out before he gets guilted into staying the night.

“Do you need any—” he starts to say.

“No, Jaime, I think I have it covered.”

There’s a normal amount of blood, or what the nurse said a normal amount of blood would look like, and her fears are dwindling with every hour that she doesn’t hemorrhage or collapse or...get smited? She’s not so sure what she’s scared of. If she believed there was dishonor in abortion, she wouldn’t have had one, and yet there’s this persistent worry that _someone_ is going to find out and...do something about it. That she’ll be branded a murderer or a whore or just plain irresponsible, and that it won’t matter whether or not any of it is true because it’s what everyone will believe. Her reputation will precede her as Brienne, the ugly wench who managed to get fucked just enough to get knocked up, and whose womanhood was so lacking she couldn’t keep it.

She looks at her reflection and runs her hands over her barely bloated belly, and she finds that she still feels no regret.

When she comes back to her room, Jaime hasn’t left. On the contrary, he has flipped himself onto his side and wiggled underneath her comforter, his back up against the wall where she was just laying. It leaves the whole other half of the bed open in front of him, and he sweeps his arm gracefully along the sheets. “My lady,” he says.

She stares for a moment. “Once I lay down, I won’t be getting back up until morning,” she warns.

“I expected that.”

“And I won’t be happy if you wake me in the middle of the night while you're trying to leave,” she says, with a little less conviction.

Jaime shrugs. “Then I suppose I won’t leave.”

She’ll kill him. Someday, she’ll kill him for saying things like that.

She crawls in next to him, perfunctory, settling under the covers on her back, eyes focused on the ceiling instead of the man next to her. She struggles with where to put her arms - down at her side feels too exposed, so she ends up with them crossed lightly over her chest in an X.

Jaime snorts. “Oh, no. The maiden has died.” 

She flings the back of her hand at his shoulder. “Shut up.”

“Oh, thank god, she lives.” She rolls onto her side away from him, resting her arms around her lower belly as it still cramps and churns. Her hot water bottle has long gone cold, so she tosses it to the floor and curls up further into the cocoon of her own arms.

She can feel Jaime’s heat behind her, just inches away, but she still tenses up when she feels his arm slip around her waist. She opens her mouth to protest, but he rubs a slow, soft circle into her stomach, and it shuts her right up. It’s gentle but insistent, more consoling than her own touch had been when she’d desperately tried to massage the pains out earlier. She feels herself relax into it, her spine curving into the mattress, and she lets out a sigh.

“Is this...alright?” he asks, his head somewhere above her. She won’t open her eyes to check.

“If you stop, I will be truly furious with you, how’s that?” 

She feels the weight of him settling into the bed behind her, his hand still kneading the almost invisible curve of her belly, and she cannot bring herself to be embarrassed about how exposed she feels. There’s warmth all along her back as he moves in closer, his arm secured around her waist as the other one comes to curve above them on the pillow. His stump nudges accidentally against the crown of her head, and he whispers a “sorry.”

She chances it then, reaches up with one hand and touches her fingertips to the thick scar tissue of his stump. She hears and feels his sharp intake of breath. “Jaime,” she begins, but then stops, not knowing how to say _thank you_ without it coming out as _I love you. I love you, and I cannot stop. I tried to pretend and forget it and push it away, but I am a fool and I have failed every time. Please. Jaime._

“Please try not to snore,” she tells him instead. Easier to joke. He’ll know she’s thankful without her saying it and showing her whole heart in the making. 

“Don’t try to push that on me, wench,” he says, reaching up to tweak her nose. “I know how many times this old thing’s been broken. Would you say you sound more like a chainsaw or a buzzsaw?”

She captures his wrist between her thumb and forefinger, twists it back just enough to make him wince and call “uncle,” but then she gently pulls his whole hand back to her stomach, and he continues his ministrations once more. And he continues on until the pain is less, or until there are tingles running under her skin alongside the pain, masking it, dulling it, wrapping her in his warmth until she’s drifting, so safe, so. So...

—-

She wakes just once in the night, and she’s relieved to find she’s in hardly any pain. There’s a soreness in her pelvis and a wetness between her legs that needs taking care of, but otherwise she feels...fine. Almost normal.

She’s less relieved to find the way she and Jaime have tangled themselves, as close as before but face-to-face now. Her face is mashed into his shoulder, a spot of drool drying on his gray shirt, and his arms have both come up to loosely encircle her head. If she glanced down at the end of the bed, she knows she’d see how far her feet stick out past his, but she thinks she might not mind when his toes are pressed up against her shins through his socks. 

If this week had gone any differently, she would have extracted herself from his embrace, rolled back to her side or pushed out of bed entirely. But she pulls him closer because she’s half asleep, and he’s so warm, and because he’s taken such good care of her, and because she wants him. She wants him like this all the time. His sternum against her nose. His elbow rubbing against her shoulder. She hadn't given much thought to his knees until they were knocking into the meat of her thighs. Now she’s sure she’s thought about every part of him. Right now, she’s thinking about all of him. 

Jaime always talks in his sleep. When his lips come to rest against her hair, and she hears him murmur, “Love you,” she squeezes her eyes shut and knows he’s not thinking about her at all. 

—

The next time she wakes, it’s morning, and the first thing she notices is that Jaime is gone.

How he managed to get out of bed without disturbing her, she’s not sure. She’s ordinarily a light sleeper, so it must be a testament to her sheer exhaustion that Jaime was able to crawl over her in the night and go back to his own room. Probably tired of having his limbs crushed by her, so she can’t blame him.

The second thing she notices is that she’s in almost no pain, all of yesterday’s cramps washed away with the night. She’s groggy and dehydrated and hungry as all hell, but if there were any doubt before that she was going to make it out unscathed, this settles that. She’s bled through onto her sheets, just a little, and she pushes away a wave of embarrassment as she strips them from the bed and tosses them in the general direction of her laundry basket. Jaime is a grown man, she tells herself. It’s his problem if he can’t handle a little abortion blood.

He’s not in his room at all when she ventures out, but in the kitchen, perched over the stove in the clothes he fell asleep in. He’s making eggs by the smell of it, and while a few days ago anything as pungent as eggs would have probably sent her heaving, now she’s suddenly ravenous for them. Is that really all? Back to normal so quickly, with no residual morning sickness or anything? She has half a mind to send the people at the clinic a fruit basket. 

“What’s all this?” She settles in at the breakfast bar.

“Breakfast,” he says simply, attempting a fancy sort of flip with his spatula and barely sticking the landing.

“Since when can you cook?” Jaime never cooks for himself, especially after the loss of his hand, but even before you’d be hard pressed to find him using any appliance other than the microwave.

“It turns out that you can actually learn new skills,” he says.

“You sure about that, old dog?”

He glares over his shoulder at her, turning off the burners and plating up. “Here, ungrateful,” he says, sliding the plate towards her. He’s cooked her eggs exactly how she likes them, even if they aren’t particularly symmetrical, and there’s bacon too, crispy all the way through except for the fat caps on the ends that she loves to squish between her molars. Her mouth is watering. She pays him no mind as she starts shoveling it in, a move her nanny Roelle would have called “unladylike” at best. 

She comes up for air, and he’s looking at her. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned or anything. He’s just looking. She quirks a small smile back. “It’s good,” she says, gesturing to her near-empty plate. “You’ve...improved.”

But he just smiles back, not a quip or retort in sight. He sets a cup of coffee in front of her, and then he turns his gaze finally from her and onto the paper.

It all feels so purely domestic, and she suddenly finds, with a sharp pang in her chest, that she can’t stand to look at him a second longer. She cannot look at him or she will remember everything about last night, the feeling of his hand curved around her belly and the love declaration that wasn’t for her ears. It would be easy to pretend that this wasn’t all because of the circumstances, that she and Jaime could have breakfast like this every morning and sleep wrapped around each other every night and it would be because they wanted to. Because he wanted to. Not out of some sense of obligation, repaying an old debt or living out a dead fantasy. 

It’s all too much to take. She stands suddenly, dropping her fork with a clatter. “I’m going out,” she declares. 

Jaime laughs. “Sure you are.”

“I’m not joking.” She’s already heading to the front door to toe on her shoes. “I have errands to run,” she restates, firm.

“What do you need?” he asks, already darting towards the key ring where he keeps his car keys.

“Jaime.” She curses the day she first considered his stubbornness a virtue. Then again, he could say the same of her. “I’ll go myself.”

Jaime’s brows knit together. “Shouldn’t you…I don’t know, aren’t you supposed to rest?”

She shrugs. “I feel fine.” It’s true that there’s not much pain, and he doesn’t need to know that she’s still bone tired and dehydrated and probably lacking in iron. If he knew any of those things, he’d try to make her stay. “Some peoole even go back to work the day after their abortions.”

“Yes, I know,” Jaime huffs, “I sent you that article.”

“Then you should know I’m fine.” She knows she’s being cold, and that it would take maybe a hundred medical articles before Jaime would stop fussing over her, but that’s why she needs to get out. So he can get over this sudden bout of tenderness and things can get back to normal.

Jaime knows he can hardly stop her from going wherever or doing whatever she pleases, but she watches him clench and unclench his fist over and knows he’s fighting the impulse to leap in front of the door and wrestle her back to bed himself. “Fine,” he says through gritted teeth. “But you’ll call me if there’s anything wrong? Or if you need anything? Or if—”

“If there’s a medical emergency, you’ll be the first to know,” she assures him.

“And what if you just miss me?” Fuck him and his stupid little smirk. She rolls her eyes and lets herself out before he can see her blush.

—

She’s not avoiding Jaime. That would require much more forethought and calculation. As it is, she simply went to Sansa’s apartment on Monday and...did not leave. 

She knows Jaime is worried about her because he has made absolutely no effort to hide it. He had texted her no less than a dozen times on Monday, mostly asking for reassurance that she was feeling better, that she wasn’t upset or overexerting herself, and one that had asked if she was “running back to Hunt.” She had shut that one down so quick she could sense him recoiling through the phone.

_If I were “running back to Hunt”,_ her texts read, dripping with indignation on the blue screen, _it would be none of your business. As it is, I’m not a moron, am I? Mind yours and I’ll mind mine._

He had called instantly to apologize, and she had forgiven him but not pressed the matter any further, and told him confidently that she’d be home the next day before hanging up. 

And then she continued to not leave Sansa’s, citing a need for “girl time” in her brief follow up texts to Jaime. That was around the point he stopped needling her, and she stopped looking at her phone so much, and neither of them really discussed what was going on at all.

Sansa, to her credit, hasn’t said much about the issue, maybe out of some sort of respect for Brienne’s “sensitive” emotional state. She’s so pleased to have Brienne all to herself that she’s taking “girl time” at face value, treating the past two days like one long sleepover, in which Brienne has learned that Sansa’s a huge fan of white wine sangria and, apparently, jigsaw puzzles. And it’s over a glass of said white wine sangria and a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle (gods save her) that Sansa finally asks:

“So why are you still here?”

Brienne sets down the puzzle piece that she’s been worrying between her thumb and forefinger for the last ten minutes. “I’ve overstayed, haven’t I?” she asks. “I’m sorry, Sansa—”

Sansa stops her with one elegant finger in the air. “That’s not what I mean. If it were up to me, you’d move into the guest bedroom and take care of me all day. Make me drink water and exercise and stuff.” Brienne ignores that this seems more like a mom thing than a friend thing (or maybe it’s just a “mom friend” thing), probably because thinking of herself as a mom feels a touch too ironic right now. Sansa continues. “I mean I’ve never seen you for such a long stretch of time because you’re always with Jaime.”

Brienne drops her head low, feeling Sansa’s gaze while completely avoiding it as the blood rushes to her cheeks and dots down her neck. “That’s not—” Sansa stops her with one quirked eyebrow before she can claim it’s not true, because it _is_ , and of course Sansa knows it is. “I just...needed some space.”

“What did he do?” Sansa says, ice cold.

“Nothing! He didn’t do anything—”

“Except I know he’s been texting you and you haven’t been answering, and when you do answer you look upset, and when you don’t answer you _also_ look upset, and I know you forgave him for something when you talked on the phone yesterday—”

“ _Sansa_!”

“It’s not eavesdropping if it’s my apartment,” she argues, which, _no_ , but anyway. “I heard you forgive him, which means he must have done something wrong. Am I right?”

Okay, so maybe Sansa’s silence hasn’t been out of respect at all. Maybe she’s just been building up ammunition for this ambush of a conversation. 

“What did he do?” Sansa asks again, softer.

Brienne sighs. “He made me breakfast.”

Sansa spares no dramatics as she throws her hands in the air and falls back onto the carpet. “I don’t under _stand_ you!”

And of course she wouldn’t, there’s no way to explain that the problem is someone cared _too much_ , paid _too_ _much_ attention to her - those aren’t problems for girls like Sansa, who long to be cherished and _deserve_ to be. Sansa can reasonably expect a level of intimacy that Brienne hasn’t even allowed herself to dream about since childhood. Certainly she had had fantasies once - a man, strong and bold, yet gentle in his approach, who would love and protect and honor her. But then she had grown stronger and bolder than the boys, and they had shown her no kindness beyond a middling sort of pity, _at best_ , and now there is no relief in the fantasy anymore. The fantasy is a reminder of what will never be hers, of what cannot be. 

“I don’t need to be taken care of,” she says by way of explanation, even though it doesn’t come close to explaining. “He was...coddling me.”

“You had an _abortion,_ ” Sansa says. “He should have been waiting on you, hand and foot.”

“That’s not his job—”

“But it was yours when he lost his hand?”

“That’s- that’s not.” She squeezes her eyes shut, frustrated and stuck on her words. She’s been called slow before, and she feels that way now, trying to untangle her thoughts before they all come out at once in a rush. “That was different.”

“How?”

And she can’t come out and say something stupid like _Because I love him_ , because it would ruin their little unspoken pact where Sansa pretends not to know exactly just how far gone Brienne is and has been for years, but there’s no other true answer she can scrounge up, so she changes course entirely.

“Do you remember what Marg said? The other day when you guys came over.”

“Marg says a lot of things.” Sansa downs her glass, ready to listen. “Was it the vacuum stuff?” 

“No. We were talking about Jaime…” She’s not looking at Sansa so much as through her, her eyes focused on a point just beyond her shoulder instead of her sympathetic eyes. “About how he’s, you know. Supportive.”

Sansa hums, doesn’t interrupt. 

“And. Well, she said something about Cersei.” She doesn’t miss the way Sansa’s sympathetic eyes darken in her periphery. “About how she never let Jaime...be there. With...you know.” Jaime and Cersei’s affair is an open secret these days, but she still doesn’t feel it’s her place to speak about his children. “And I realized that this is like a second chance for him. He can drive me to the appointment, and buy me all the supplies,” _and sleep in my bed, his arms wrapped around me_ , she doesn’t say, “and it wouldn’t be that hard for him to pretend that...that it’s all for her.” She crooks her mouth in a wry, sad smile. “That is, if he doesn’t look too closely.”

She meets Sansa’s eyes finally and expects to see her soft, nurturing gaze, but finds that Sansa’s only staring at her blankly, her mouth a thin straight line. For a long time neither of them says anything, and Brienne feels the prickle of insecurity down her chest and in the pit of her stomach. She’s said too much, and now she’s nothing more than a pathetic child with a crush. 

“That’s what you thought Margaery was saying?” Sansa says finally, dry and very much her mother’s daughter. “That Jaime is just using you to feel better about his past?”

“I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose,” she clarifies. 

Sansa pours herself another glass. “You’re exhausting to me, you have to know that.”

Brienne bristles a bit. “Well, you asked.”

“I’m actually kind of impressed,” Sansa says, “at how you’ve managed to talk yourself into believing this completely fake scenario.”

Brienne can only gape at that. _Careful, you’ll catch flies_ , the Jaime in her head jokes, pleased with himself as always.

“Jaime would cut off his other hand for you,” Sansa says, like it’s just a matter of fact. Water is wet, the sky is blue, Jaime would lose a hand for her. “He’s gotten into bar fights for _you_ . He gives you gifts just because they remind him of _you_. He’s jealous of every guy you ever date.” Is that true? Was it jealousy that made him hate Hyle? “And he looks at you like—”

“Don’t,” she says sharply, incapable of handling any description of how Jaime may or may not _look_ at her, but Sansa’s not that deterred.

“He _adores_ you, and you think this is all just some abortion fantasy?”

Well, yeah, it sounds stupid when she says it like that. “Not an _abortion_ fantasy, just a...a caretaker fantasy.”

“Bri, I think that’s just called ‘wanting to take care of you.’”

She swallows. “But—”

“Notice how I didn’t say ‘wanting to take care of _someone_ .’ He wants to take care of _you_.”

But how could that be, she wants to ask, when everything she’s ever been taught points to the opposite? Ever since she was old enough to understand the jeers and snickers that were flung her way, she was old enough to learn how to brush them off. To fight words with fists, and to learn how to live alone, and to be content with being her own protector. There was being cared for, which she had - there was her father, always loving even in his stoicism, and her friends, whose love was becoming easier to accept as fact. But being _cared for_ is different than being taken _care of_ . Before the other night with Jaime, she can’t remember the last time she felt _held_ by somebody. Contained and lifted by them. She knows now, from the trembling in her hands and the marching drum beat of her chest, that she’s _terrified_. How horrible to be completely at the mercy of someone else’s care. 

How wonderful, the traitorous part of her thinks.

“I know that I can’t completely change your perspective on this, because you are stubborn and impossible,” Sansa says, some of the affection leaking back into her voice, “but I wouldn’t be a very good friend if I let you go on believing that you’re some consolation prize and not the woman of his dreams.”

It is hard to reconcile what she knows to be true (or what she _thinks_ she knows to be true) about herself with what Sansa is saying. Words are wind most of the time, they can’t change her into the kind of woman that Jaime Lannister makes breakfast for. But Sansa wouldn’t lie to her, and that has to count for something. And Jaime is her dearest friend, which has to count for even more.

She leans in so she can grasp Sansa’s shoulder snugly. “You’re a very good friend. I’m so sorry I imposed for so long…”

“Oh, Bri, no!” Sansa pulls her into a hug, tighter than she should really be capable of. “It’s never an imposition. But really, do you think you’re the only one whose phone is getting blown up by Jaime Lannister? I wish you’d go home just so he’d stop asking me,” -she puts on her deep, fake man voice- “‘Is she mad at me? God, I’ll just die if she’s mad at me.’”

Brienne flushes a deep red, but she also laughs. “He’s relentless.”

“Indeed,” Sansa says cryptically. Brienne’s phone buzzes, once, twice, a third time all in a row. “That’s probably him,” Sansa says, straying towards giddiness. “Please don’t ignore it, I’m begging you.”

Brienne doesn’t, and she’s already planning out the massive apology she owes him in her head, but when she lifts the phone she sees that none of the texts are from Jaime. 

_Hey_

_Brienne_

_Can we talk_

“It’s Hyle,” Brienne says, and Sansa groans.

—

She agrees to meet with him in person because it feels decent to do so, but in public so she’s less inclined to knock his lights out when she sees his face. She’d told Jaime she wasn’t mad at Hyle at the beginning, but then she spent weeks vomiting and a weekend bleeding her guts out, and now she thinks they’re maybe not on such great terms. 

But she’s not as angry as she assumed she’d be when he sits down across from her at the cafe. If anything, she’s surprised by her own ambivalence towards him. He’s just...some guy, unremarkable in most ways. Neither particularly attractive nor unattractive, not a stand-out in a crowd. How had she convinced herself that he was it for her? 

_Because you thought you’d never do better._

He at least has the decency to look shamed when he utters a quiet, “Hello, then.” She gestures for him to sit, stone-faced and silent. Normally she doesn’t like to watch people be uncomfortable, but there’s a twisted sort of satisfaction in watching Hyle squirm. _You think you’re uncomfortable? I just had an abortion!_ She almost quirks a smile - Jaime would laugh at that, commend her for making a “real joke.” Gods, she’s pathetic for him.

She waits for Hyle to speak, and when he does it’s a simple, “I suppose I need to apologize.”

It’s not an apology. She can feel her teeth grinding against each other. “Do you?” she asks. “Whatever for?”

He flushes red, averts her gaze. “Come on, Bri...It doesn’t have to be like this…”

She waits, unspeaking. It feels powerful to choose silence and wield it against him here. She’s not trying to make herself small - if anything, she’s taking up space and watching him shrink under her gaze.

He throws his arms up, like she’s forced his hand. “I’m sorry, alright! I freaked out, okay, you have to give me that at least!”

She nods. “Okay.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” he says, and there’s something pleading in his gaze, something that almost makes her feel guilty for being so cold. Almost. “I know you probably don’t wanna get back together—” She snorts, and she watches him fight the urge to be offended. “Right. I don’t expect you to take me back or anything, but I’d like to contribute whatever I can. I’ll help pay for all the bills and the baby stuff—”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“It is, Brienne.” He leans in, looks like he plans to put a hand on her arm but then thinks better of it. “Look, just ‘cuz you and I didn’t work out doesn’t mean the baby should go on without a father.”

“There’s not a baby,” she says plainly. “It’s already taken care of.” She flashes a tight, curt smile. 

“Oh fuck,” he gasps as it dawns on him. “I’ve fucked it all, haven’t I?” 

“Hyle.”

“I’m the deadbeat,” he says, which, yeah _kinda_ , but then he says, “I ditched and you got rid of it. Because of _me_.”

“ _Hyle_ ,” she says again, harsher, because she can’t stand another second of him making her abortion about himself. “I didn’t do it because you weren’t there. I would have done it anyway.”

“Oh.” She can’t tell if he looks relieved or chastised. “And you didn’t tell me?” She levels a glare. “Sorry!”

She begins to pack up her things, certain there’s nothing beneficial to be gained from the rest of this conversation. “Well, I’m glad we cleared all that up. Good luck, Hyle.” She stands, but he rushes to his feet too and darts in front of her.

“Bri…” His eyes are softer when they meet hers, and she briefly feels a surge of...not affection, but _something_ for the man. “I really am sorry you had to go through that.”

She nods. “Thanks. It really wasn’t all that bad.” 

“Still. I’m sorry you did it alone.”

There’s an inexplicable smile pulling at her cheeks, one that probably makes her look a little crazy. She thinks of what Sansa said, of bacon crackling in a hot pan, and of soothing fingers in her hair, and she says:

“I wasn’t alone.”

—

Jaime’s not in the living room when she finally gets back to the apartment, which is unusual for him. Usually around sunset he likes to lounge in the common area like a cat, soaking up the last of the day’s warmth while she makes dinner (or, more often, while she orders in dinner). But the lights are all off, and the couch is home only to a worn old quilt, not her roommate/best friend/ _something else entirely_.

He’s not in his room either, and she’s panicked for a moment that oh gods, _he’s left her too_ . But that wouldn’t be like him, she reminds herself, and it’s much more likely that he’s out somewhere looking for her. Because she left _him_ high and dry the other day, not the other way around. She swallows another wave of shame.

She trudges back to her own room, hoping to sink into the comfort of her own bed again, but she halts at the door when she sees the six-foot-something lump curled under her comforter, a hint of golden curls peeking out from the top. 

She feels something burst inside her, as if her heart has grown two sizes and then just shattered entirely. Like she doesn’t need it anymore, because he’s so clearly holding it in himself.

“Jaime,” she says softly, but loud enough to rouse him so she won’t have to do something crazy like _touch_ him.

His head swivels towards her, eyes half-open. “Well, this is embarrassing,” he croaks, still sleep-groggy and tousled and so fucking cute she could kill him. He presses himself up like he plans to get off her bed, but she rushes in to sit next to him.

“Don’t get up,” she says, pressing him back into the mattress with two fingers on his shoulder. He just about melts for her, sinking back against the long body pillow that she likes to curl herself around and pretend that she isn’t imagining his solid torso instead. 

He stares up at her for a moment, blinks like he can’t believe she’s there, then glances away. “I know this must look...strange…”

She snorts, ungraceful, and it makes him smile on impulse. It seems insane now that she never noticed before, the way she never catches him smiling like that for anyone else. She feels that unshakeable fear that she’s getting her hopes up again, so she tamps it down. She has to know first.

“What are you doing in here?” She tries to sound stern, but her hands are running themselves gently over the blankets, tracing a line parallel to his arm, the two never intersecting.

“I’m _trying_ to get some rest, but someone finally decided to grace us all with her presence.” He sounds bitter. It makes a fearful bile rise in her throat, and she has to fight the urge to spit something harsh in return.

“I’m sorry I ran out,” she blurts. “And I’m sorry I ignored you. That wasn’t right.”

“Wench.” He sighs, weary and resigned, and she’s truly worried now that she broke something here. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

“I do, I--”

“ _You don’t_.” He slides into a seated position, but it only makes it easier for him to turn his eyes away from her. “I was overstepping. I was being obnoxious and smothering, and I’m sorry.” He sighs, runs a hand over his sheet-indented face. “I know how important your independence is to you. I know you don’t like to be coddled, and I did it anyway.”

“No, Jaime…” She should have expected something like this, but she had been overly prepared to do most of the groveling herself. Now they’ve gone completely off track. “You weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“I was doing what I always do!” 

“And what’s that?” she asks, growing frustrated with him and his self-loathing that always talks and never listens.

“Fucking it up.”

“Gods, Jaime!” She rotates away from him, perched just on the edge of her own bed. She takes a deep breath, and then she decides to just switch tactics entirely. “Tell me why.”

“Tell you why? Why what?”

“Tell me why you wanted to…” _take care of me_ “...why you’re in my bed.” _Tell me why you’re here, breathing in the smell of my pillowcase. Tell me why you called so many times. Tell me why you held me like that, and I will forgive you. Everything will be fine if you can just tell me why._

He shrugs. “It seemed as good a place as any. I’ve always liked your bed. Strapping gal like you needs a big, lush bed like this—”

“Jaime,” she says. “Say what you mean. I’m begging.”

“This is your idea of begging? You’re not even on your knees—”

“ _Jaime_.”

“ _Brienne_ ,” he echoes, a precious sort of anguish in his eyes. He barks a short laugh, but there’s no mirth in it, just a fragile desperation. “You must know. Surely, you have to know why.”

“You have to say it,” she insists, “because I can’t.” _Be brave_ , she thinks. “You have to tell me why you’re in my bed, or else…” One more deep breath. “Or else I can never tell you why I want you to stay in it.”

So he shows her.

Her lips part for him naturally, without thought or hesitation, as his hand confidently, _tenderly_ cradles the back of her head. Her own hands are frozen, clutching at the bedsheets until his tongue is gently prodding at her lips, _her_ tongue, and then there’s nothing she can do but get her hands all over him as fast as possible. 

_Jaime_ , she thinks, feels in her bones, _Jaime Jaime Jaime_. Jaime’s lips, Jaime’s fingers, his smell like nothing she’s ever smelled, the taste of him like a waking dream. She presses her fingers into the divot of his collarbone and the warm flesh of his throat, smooths them over his beard and into the silky short hairs at the back of his neck, and she knows that she will never forget this as long as she lives.

Jaime pulls away, and she readies herself to have the conversation now, but he latches onto the sensitive skin where her strong jaw meets her neck, and her eyes quite literally roll backwards. 

“You know,” she says breathlessly, amazed she can speak at all when his mouth is doing _that_ to her, “you didn’t actually say—”

“I love you.” 

And then the breath is gone from her entirely. She gets the sensation that she’s about to cry, but no tears come. There’s only a restless, quaking energy that she thinks might just be the greatest joy she’s ever felt. 

When she doesn’t immediately respond, he pulls away and meets her eyes to find them sparkling. He traces her slight smile with his thumb. “I didn’t know if you were coming back,” he admits. “That’s why I was in your bed. I wanted to remember how it felt to be held by you. For a little while longer.”

And she does cry, how could she not, just one great shudder followed by a stream of hot tears that she presses into his soft shirt.

“Brienne,” he whispers, stroking over her spine, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, you absolute moron!” She pushes away from him, just far enough that she can hold his shoulders in place with her hands and force him to look her in the eye when she finally says it. “I have loved you for so long.”

And then he’s in her arms again, pressed so close she’s almost certain they’re going to fuse together in some places. There’s more to say, so much more, but for now she’s content (overjoyed, _elated_ ) to let the silence take them. To press herself into the beating heart in his chest and think, _that’s mine_.

—

She goes back to the clinic two weeks later for a follow-up appointment, and she and Dr. Tarly are both pleased when her pregnancy test comes back negative. Her side effects have been minimal for the most part, mostly just some on and off bleeding and cramping, and she feels it’s a small price to pay. 

When Dr. Tarly asks her about her emotional state, her thoughts instantly jump to Jaime. “I’m great,” she says, then remembers that they’re talking about her abortion and not her love life. “I’m fine, I mean,” she corrects. 

Dr. Tarly chuckles. “It’s alright if you’re great! A lot of people say it’s a big relief once it’s all done.” And it is. She’s glad it’s over, and she’s glad she chose the right thing for her. She’s glad she did it herself, but that she didn’t do it alone. 

They send her on her way with some safe sex pamphlets, which feels...patronizing, but not unfair. In the car, Jaime laughs at the one with a sullen teen on the front, says, “Is this supposed to inspire confidence in sexually active teens? I’ve never seen someone so disappointed to be on the pill!”

Things have settled since that first kiss, since the first night together when they huddled close in her bed and shared all the secrets they had been keeping for years. It feels more and more real every day and somehow still like a fantasy. Jaime _loves_ her. Jaime loves _her_. She has a whole mountain of evidence now, and it still feels like she’s floating in a blue-lit dream. She wonders if the feeling will go away with the honeymoon period, or if it will just melt into the fabric of their everyday life together. She hopes so.

There’s still something itching at her that she hasn’t mentioned yet. She’s afraid it’s too soon or too presumptuous of her, but considering how this whole thing started, it’s not like she can really avoid it.

She waits to bring it up until they’re almost ready for bed that night, dressed down to their sleep shorts on the couch with Jaime warming his hand and stump underneath Brienne’s tattered sleep shirt. If she thought Jaime was handsy before, it’s nothing compared to now; somehow, some way, he is always touching her. She likes the way he’s touching her now, with his hand on the fleshiest part of her hip and his stump resting across the flat of her belly, likes it so much that she almost puts off the conversation again for fear that he will pull away.

But she can’t stand not knowing, so she does what she does best by being brave, and she asks, “What if I’m never ready for children?”

He doesn’t pull away at all. He just hums thoughtfully into her shoulder. “Then I guess you won’t have any.”

But that’s not really the question or the answer she was grasping for. “And you would…” She swallows thickly. “That wouldn’t be disappointing to you?”

She recognizes the hurt on his face, and as much as it pains her to be the cause of it, she just has to know right now if this is going to be a dealbreaker before she falls any deeper in love with him than she already is. “I know how badly you wanted to be a father to your children,” she says. “I could never forgive myself if I took that away from you again.”

And then the pain in his eyes dissolves into something almost amused, not quite mocking, and he says, quite simply, “Brienne.” His thumb massages a circle into her temple. “How could you think you could take anything away from me?” He kisses her nose, her forehead, and whispers into her furrowed brow, “You have already given me everything.”

She pulls (well, more like yanks) him into her, forces his head to rest against her chest so she can take him fully in her arms. She feels his kisses dust across her clavicle, on the shoulder where her shirt has dipped down, and she feels _almost_ certain of his answer when she asks, “You would still love me?”

He slides up to take her lips in his, open-mouthed and hot and deep, and she can hear now the way he says _yes, yes, of course, yes_ , without saying anything at all. He’s always been good at that, at telling her how much he loves her without saying it. It’s just that she can see it clearer now. She’s not standing in her own way anymore.

They make out like teenagers for a while, right there on the couch, until they’re both panting and Jaime is surreptitiously adjusting his shorts. She’s mortified at first, but she’s soon filled with a liquid smooth delight - she did _that_ to him. Soon she’ll do more.

But for now they’re both happy to settle for a loose embrace, heads bowed together at the temple. He closes his eyes, but she keeps hers open. She drinks in all of him while neither of them speak for a long time, but it’s Jaime who breaks the silence as always.

“Even if things had been different,” he starts tentatively. “Even if it had been _mine_ ,” he says, and she knows what he means, “none of this would have gone any differently. I would have supported you the whole way.” He opens his eyes, liquid gold. 

And she’s not sure yet if she wants children, or if she ever will, but it’s reassuring that someday there might be the option to have them with him. A child deserves no less than Jaime, devoted and true, as its father.

“Hey,” he says, and she does not trust his tone at all, “I read this article…you can have sex as soon as one day after your medical abortion—”

She shoves at him while he snickers, and she adds “annoying” to the list. Devoted, and true, and fucking annoying. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what abortion laws would look like in a modern day Westeros, and I'm not super familiar with European abortion, so i mostly pulled from how they work in America (which is to say...not super well!!!)
> 
> content warnings:  
> -lots of discussion and description of abortion and all that comes with it (blood, pain, guilt/fear of judgment)  
> -brienne says/thinks a lot of demeaning things about her body, including not feeling "womanly" enough to be pregnant, feeling like a failure re: womanhood, etc.  
> -some playful slutshaming between friends  
> -men trying to make everything about themselves


End file.
